Gaston Bachelard Quotes
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If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
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The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
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Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
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Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
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Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
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The reflected world is the conquest of calm
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The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
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For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.
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There is no original truth, only original error.
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Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.
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The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.
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A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.
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The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace
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True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.
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Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
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All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.
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Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.
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Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.
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All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.
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This word "description" may be disconcerting when used to refer to what is generally called a translation. But when one wishes to render a verbal creation (as opposed to a didactic statement) from one language to another, he is confronted with two equally unsatisfactory choices. He may, according to his talents, elaborate a similar, but never identical creation, or he may describe that creation as completely as possible in his own language.
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Perhaps it is even a good idea to stir up a rivalry between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, one will encounter nothing but disappointments if he intends to make them cooperate. The image can not provide matter for a concept. By giving stability to the image, the concept would stifle its life.
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Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
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Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state.